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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Energy Res.
Sec. Nuclear Energy
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2025.1498331
Development of the 3D SPN transport solver KANECS for nuclear reactor analysis
Provisionally accepted- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
For practical reactor analysis, a low-order transport approximation such as simplified spherical harmonics (SP N ) has become widely used due to its improved accuracy over diffusion and lower computational cost compared to spherical harmonics (P N ) and discrete-ordinate (S N ) methods.This paper introduces and verifies KANECS, a new neutronic solver that employs the SP N approximation and continuous Galerkin finite-element method (CGFEM) for angular and spatial discretization respectively, to solve the 3D steady-state multigroup neutron transport equation in Cartesian geometry. For the numerical verification, the KAIST and C5G7 benchmarks were selected. The results show that KANECS predicts with promising accuracy the k eff and power distribution, fairly close to the ones of transport approach. Consequently, KANECS demonstrates that it can effectively perform a pin-by-pin core analysis.
Keywords: Neutron transport, SP N approximation, finite-element method, steady-state, Pin-by-pin
Received: 18 Sep 2024; Accepted: 24 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 DURAN, CAMPOS and SANCHEZ. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
JULIAN DURAN, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
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